Sam Houston State’s season ends with loss to UTSA

Sam Houston State men’s basketball coach Bob Marlin certainly seems to have much to be proud of with this year’s squad.

The Bearkats, one of the Southland Conference powers, seemed to be in rebuilding mode when it left Stephen F. Austin in early January with a 6-8 record. But the they had an incredible turnaround, winning 12 of their next 15 games to capture the SLC West Division title.

The magic, however, came to an end Thursday when No.3 seed Sam Houston State was knocked out the first round of the SLC Tournament by virtue of an 83-74 loss to No.6 UT-San Antonio at the Merrell Center. But Marlin said the loss didn’t take away from what the Bearkats had accomplished this season.

“It’s about this team, they gave us a lot of joy this year,” said Marlin, whose team finished the year 18-12. “They played extremely hard.”

This year’s senior class didn’t hit the 20-win plateau but still leaves averaging 20 wins for their career. Marlin also became just the second coach in SLC history to reach 200 wins, but that wasn’t something he wished to dwell on Thursday.

“It’s like I told someone the other day, we’re still 700 behind Coach (Bob) Knight,” he said. “That puts it in perspective.”

SFA keeps rolling

Stephen F. Austin coach Danny Kaspar couldn’t say enough about his seniors Josh Alexander and Matt Kingsley after Thursday night’s 67-56 win over Southeastern Louisiana in the first round of the SLC Tournament.

They were the show.

Alexander, the 2008 SLC Player of the Year, was on fire with a game-high 25 points on 6-of-8 shooting from 3-point range to go along with seven rebounds. Kingsley, this season’s SLC Player of the Year, scored 13 points and grabbed a game-high 17 rebounds as the No.1 seeded Lumberjacks move on to Friday’s semi-final round at the Merrell Center.

“I think Alexander and Kingsley deserve a lot of credit for this victory, and I would keep them for another couple years if I could,” Kaspar said.

7 Responses

I guess this has become the Southland Blog and you forgot about Prairie View A&M and Texas Southern. There’s no mention of the Swac tournament thats going on and no mention of the Swac All Conferance Players that was named earlier in the week.

Nobody cares about Southern and Prarie View A&M. Obviously they are poor instructional institutions if you can’t even utilize correct grammar. Change “was” to “were”, then we can recognize your school.

I know the SWAC fans on here do not understand that you are actually at the SLC hoops tournament in the Houston area, which has an all-Texas final. The SWAC championship is several states’ away and is not as easy to cover.

I’ve always said the Southland schools have their own local newspapers so this blog is nothing but “bonus coverage” for them…

When I saw no story from the TSU-PV men’s basketball game in HOUSTON….I knew we hit rock bottom…

The SWAC schools have to deal with the Chronicle as their “local” paper and the relatively little coverage they receive is pathetic…yes, the editors will point to lack of interest from alums of both schools as to the little coverage but damn, if you never went out the way to give them consistent coverage to say your doing something in good faith it’ll always be like this

The Chronicle sent a reporter to Birmingham in 2007..he’s the soccer writer now

An All-Texas final with 2 teams more than 2 hours away…lol…..”local” coverage

I will say this, both Stephen F. Austin and UT-San Antonio have more Houston kids on them than the PV women have, if that means anything. But as the one reader correctly observed, we covered the Southland Conference Tourney because it was local so that is why there were blogs. We did not go to Birmingham for the SWAC. But look for stories and blogs this week as PV prepares for NCAA Tourney.

UH has a small amount of Houston kids on the men’s side but…….nevermind…didn’t know that’s the prerequisite for the lack of coverage now..lol

Coop can recruit nationally for talent that’s arguably just as touted as highly skilled Houston recruits who will always look down on local schools for whatever reason…

if anything, we need to embrace that as that’s a better caliber player we’re not used to seeing out here most of the time collegiately as Prairie View is probably the 2nd best team in the area with one of the top names to ever play women’s basketball